Working experience in an Israeli company
"The Prague Cemetery" by Umberto Eco contains the following statement by Édouard Drumont in p.436:
"What we found most repugnant is the peculiar accent that characterises Jewish speech. Our ears are particularly irritated by sharp, hissing, strident sounds of this kind."
It's true to some extent...some of the sounds are strident, but I believe any languages have more or less similar peculiar pronunciation for ears of non-natives. Although not exactly causing the same feeling, Tamil consonant ழ் sounds like zh, but most of Tamils (if not all) would never agree. Armenian Ր / ր also sounds similar (at least for me).
This note is purposed to record my brief experience in working for an Israeli company, not to talk about languages. However, it may not be the right time to talk about this under the ongoing crisis in the Middle East. This is purely my very limited experience by my biased mind, therefore any generalization or inference by this article would be invalid.
In January 2000, a Massachusetts based company approached me for a decent position. After three telephone interviews, face-to-face interviews took place in an office in the suburb of Boston, MA, and I received a phone call one the way back home from Narita Airport and learned that the company would hire me. While I was aware that the company had been acquired by an Israeli company, nothing was mentioned about Israel during that hiring process. My boss with German heritage was located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which was a bit odd. I suspect that there was a hidden agenda for hiring, which is just an evil guess, though there must have been some politics. It was theoretically impossible that a Jewish person with a kippah would sit in an office in Kuala Lumpur…as a matter of fact, the development center in Kuala Lumpur would be shut down two years later.
I soon visited Tel-Aviv just after several preceding meetings in Boston and New York. I took a UA flight from Boston to JFK and Lufthansa flights to Tel-Aviv via Frankfurt. Upon arrival, I realized that my luggage had been lost, which was not a big deal, and the luggage was brought to my room next day. It was the 2nd case of lost luggage for me, the first experience being at my business trip to Amsterdam via Paris/Charles de Gaulle back in 1994.
The company required me to make travels quite often, thanks to which I visited Tel-Aviv seven times, mainly to take clients and partners for a meeting in the HQ. Indeed, the company had "interesting" application products on top of voice technology, though it did not own any base technology such as speech synthesis or speech recognition, except for voice print based biometrics. I spent quite long time to support the mainstream products, though I was engaged in development of a voice-driven calling application.
I had better not talk about the products in detail, but just want to thank them to learn an interesting coined word- Slideware or PowerPoint Engineering. While Japanese companies are in general very meticulous in developing a prototype for a new product, what they did was instead to develop a PowerPoint slide which talks about fancy features of the new "product". Their idea was to develop a real product once a client says s/he wants to buy it... By that approach, they can keep the initial cost very (if not absurdly) low.
In a contract negotiation with a Japanese company, the Israeli company suggested a court of arbitration be at Los Angeles with pretexts
#1 that a 3rd country had better be chosen to be fair for both parties,
#2 that Los Angeles would be probably more convenient for a Japanese company while natural choice for an Israeli company would be London.
This triggered an expected reaction by the Japanese company…this is a well-known technique, and the consequence was exactly as expected.
Interestingly, I don't recall anything about food I ate during my stay in Israel, which can be interpreted as no food was strikingly impressive. Only one memory I have is that a BA flight from London/Heathrow to Tel-Aviv offered Kosher food.
Some of my colleagues in Tel Aviv suggested that I transfer to Tel Aviv. That sounded a bit tempting. Had I gone that route, my life would have been much different.
A few anecdotal experiences:
Upon leaving Tel-Aviv on my first trip to Israel, at 2:00 a.m. at Ben Gurion International Airport in order to take Lufthansa flight 691 (YES, 691 is an interesting prime number which appears as the numerator of the twelfth Bernoulli number -691/2730) departing at 5:30am, I went to through interrogation by officers with repeated unrelenting questions - whom I had met, who had bought the air-ticket, how the flight-route had been chosen, whether I had visited Lebanon during my stay... as if I had been in "The Trial / Der Process" by Franz Kafka.
In one occasion on a flight back to Tokyo, I took a very early morning Lufthansa flight from Tel-Aviv to Frankfurt, the flight was unable to start taxing due to a person being inquired by immigration officers. After 30 minutes or longer, the passenger was allowed to enter into the plane, but then again summoned by the same officers out of the plane. After 1 hour, he was "clear"ed, followed by an announcement by the pilot, who said "due to a reason which I cannot explain, the flight had to be delayed for an hour...". I was very sure the same thing could have happened for me. For those officers, "I am innocent" type response is helplessly ineffective. If somebody says that I am biased against Israel and what I described here is just a fake, which is a famous word frequently used by the ex-POTUS, whose name should never be uttered from my mouth, so be it. I would not waste my time to argue.
On another occasion, at Frankfurt airport, before taking an El-Al flight LY358 to Tel-Aviv, I went through 1-hour interrogation by El-Al officers about my luggage. After that uncomfortable experience I went to a check-in counter, where a ground staff told me about her observation how I had been interrogated, and conveyed her commiseration to me.
In a very short summary, it was an "interesting" experience for me. While I stayed in Tel-Aviv, there was a missile-attack, which was something like "Welcome to Tel-Aviv".
Again, this is yet another very difficult time in the human history initiated by the human-looking alien in Mordor in the north Eurasian continent...Retaliation from the Iranian side has made the situation even worse.
I'm not against Jewish people, and I do not naïvely protest against "genocide", but I am against the country's attitude and its business with the dictator-led North Korea like but rich and filthy country facing the Caspian Sea to join the attacks to Armenia.
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